Texas Begins a Huge Highway Project; Not All Are Happy

Exactly right. Express lanes with limited access are the solution. For example, Chicago has express lanes heading north out of the city and allow you to get to the suburbs very quickly. In addition, express lanes are a MUCH better idea than the HOV lanes pushed by the eco-nazis. See how New Jersey ended HOV lanes without losing Federal hiway dollars at http://www.users.nac.net/jmp/rd_hov.html

Yea - leadership would have been explaining to the voters that the gas tax, unlike property taxes and sales taxes have no built-in inflation adjustment. In fact with hybrids coming on line, and other mileage improvements, a stagnant per-gallon gas tax doesn't stand a chance. That's why the state cannot afford to build freeways today. Two options:

1) Increase the gas tax sufficiently - maybe 20 cents per gallon (or about 1 cent per mile for the average driver)

2) Charge a mileage tax - where everyone pays, regardless of what road they drive on (in effect, like a gas tax, but hybrids pay just as much).

To me, #2 is better - in an ideal world. But I don't trust government nearly enough to apply a mileage tax just for roads, and to not take advantage of the data they could collect in implementing the mileage tax (like knowing our driving habits and thus letting their friends know when to break into our houses). Given that Option 1 will still work for the next decade or two (at least), so let's use it.

What is not leadership is just tossing the freeway system into the trash, as our governor is in the process of doing. Then building a system of the most expensive toll roads in the world, and then telling us that he didn't raise our taxes. That's why I despise him.

i think the meaning here was that 98% of the original national freeway system of the eisenhower administration was paid with u.s. military money.

the u.s. military thought a freeway system vital to our defense if we were ever attacked.

the u.s. military thought a freeway system vital to our defense if we were ever attacked.

Indeed it is. The interstate system is in need of updating though. It will take something as radical as the original idea to do it. Private roads that would be used by trucks is an idea that should be looked at seriously. The roads we need to move the commerce shouldn't be modeled on Route66, save that for auto traffic

Texas should finish the highways that are currently torn up and under construction. Start with I-45 between Dallas and Houston at Corsicana that has been torn up and one-lane at some places since we moved here seven years ago. Virtually every highway in Texas is under construction somewhere because the highway construction companies give big bucks to the pols in Austin. It never ends. Motorists have died on ill-marked, dangerous construction areas near Lubbock and Fort Stockton. I'd like to see the figures on fatalities caused by highway construction in Texas, but that is never divulged.

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